“Do not harm him. I would not have him harmed.”
It was Théroigne that spoke. She stood apart, white and chill as a figure of ice.
He spat curses at her, that mingled with the deadlier tumult. Monsieur le président made his voice heard above the din.
“Eject this person, without hurt, from the rear of the prison.”
Seized, then, despite his frantic struggles; protesting; striving for foothold; conscious always of the desperate outcry—faint, and fainter—of the unhappy man he had sought to befriend, Ned felt himself hurried along corridors, borne down steps and by way of echoing dank vaults—thrust violently into a world of spacious silence.
A door shut with a steely clang behind him. Before, stretched a desolate waste tract of fields. The moon was at its full-flood light, and the whole world seemed to float quietly on a sea of peace.
He threw himself, face-downwards, amongst the tufts of coarse grass, and cried upon the flood to overwhelm him.
CHAPTER XIV.
At the end of November the young Viscount Murk was still a sojourner in Paris. Always reserved and self-contained, he was become by then a creature of wilful and habitual loneliness, with something, indeed, of the moral dyspepsia that is induced of the morbid appetite that leads one to feed upon one’s own heart. And when the heart is so inflamed of love as to be sensitive to the least imaginary slight, assuredly the dyspepsia, as in Ned’s case, shall be acute.
Men of few or no friendships have a very undivided passion to bestow when at last the call comes to them. At the same time such are wont to signalise the early stages of their complaint by a diffidence so exaggerated as that, in the nature of nature, it must degenerate in course into a desperately injured vanity. It is to be feared that, at this period of his ailing, Ned was horribly big with a sense of grievance generally against the social order, that seemed so parsimonious of the favours (as represented by one only favour, in fact) that his position entitled him to draw upon. What was the good, in short, of being possessed of acres, a lordship, an agreeable personality, if all could not procure him the single modest gift he had ever asked of Fortune?